I just watched a video on KDE Neon, within 2:30 he was into the terminal to run a command to get the standard home directory folders so browsers would have a downloads folder to download to. It also seemed pretty slow, and maybe it was running in a VM, but my experience with KDE was always that it was slow and rather quirky with all the panel stuff.
When I checked out a Zorin OS video it took 1 minute for him to say using the command line would really level up your experience and then he tried to push a course on Linux mastery. After the sales pitch he talked about the new upgrade app that made things super easy, but I couldn’t really tell what was going on. It kept opening browsers and made it look like he had to pay for an update? There was some kind of “pro” version. He also mentioned it doesn’t do automatic updates and it’s up to the user, because that’s “the Linux way”. Average users aren’t going to do updates on their own, ever.
Not a great start. Not to mention all the research someone would have to do to even arrive at these distros as their short list. There is more to making an OS usable and not a hobby than just copying the old Windows start menu. Picking a distro is its own hobby.
I did like what I saw with Zorin when it came to having a simple settings option to pick the preferred desktop layout, rather than making people switch desktop environments and install and bunch of plugins and customizations to get to what most people probably want. The way wine was integrated it was interesting, nice if it works well, but I think it might hold some people back form finding proper Linux alternatives to some of their apps (which is another hobby in and of itself).
I may look into Zorin OS a little more, but I still don’t think I’d recommend it to someone who wasn’t looking for a new hobby, assuming they need more than just a web browser.
I have been running KDE Neon on my 10 year old laptop for a couple of years and I haven’t done anything you’ve mentioned here. KDE Neon gives you a notification when system updates are available and it’s just a mouse click if you decide to do it. No terminal involved.
As far as resources usages, it’s by far the lightest desktop among the “heavyweights” like Gnome etc. KDE used to be a resource hog in the past but it is not the case any more. In fact it has not been the case for a few years now. I installed latest Fedora Gnome last month and immediately went back to KDE because Gnome (or Fedora) took too much resources that the laptop was practically unusable.
I have also run Zorin OS in the past. The pro version is to get extra themes and customer support. You are not missing any functions in the free version.
I just watched a video on KDE Neon, within 2:30 he was into the terminal to run a command to get the standard home directory folders so browsers would have a downloads folder to download to. It also seemed pretty slow, and maybe it was running in a VM, but my experience with KDE was always that it was slow and rather quirky with all the panel stuff.
When I checked out a Zorin OS video it took 1 minute for him to say using the command line would really level up your experience and then he tried to push a course on Linux mastery. After the sales pitch he talked about the new upgrade app that made things super easy, but I couldn’t really tell what was going on. It kept opening browsers and made it look like he had to pay for an update? There was some kind of “pro” version. He also mentioned it doesn’t do automatic updates and it’s up to the user, because that’s “the Linux way”. Average users aren’t going to do updates on their own, ever.
Not a great start. Not to mention all the research someone would have to do to even arrive at these distros as their short list. There is more to making an OS usable and not a hobby than just copying the old Windows start menu. Picking a distro is its own hobby.
I did like what I saw with Zorin when it came to having a simple settings option to pick the preferred desktop layout, rather than making people switch desktop environments and install and bunch of plugins and customizations to get to what most people probably want. The way wine was integrated it was interesting, nice if it works well, but I think it might hold some people back form finding proper Linux alternatives to some of their apps (which is another hobby in and of itself).
I may look into Zorin OS a little more, but I still don’t think I’d recommend it to someone who wasn’t looking for a new hobby, assuming they need more than just a web browser.
I have been running KDE Neon on my 10 year old laptop for a couple of years and I haven’t done anything you’ve mentioned here. KDE Neon gives you a notification when system updates are available and it’s just a mouse click if you decide to do it. No terminal involved.
As far as resources usages, it’s by far the lightest desktop among the “heavyweights” like Gnome etc. KDE used to be a resource hog in the past but it is not the case any more. In fact it has not been the case for a few years now. I installed latest Fedora Gnome last month and immediately went back to KDE because Gnome (or Fedora) took too much resources that the laptop was practically unusable.
I have also run Zorin OS in the past. The pro version is to get extra themes and customer support. You are not missing any functions in the free version.